


Such Gentle Temper Found

by TheWaffleBat



Series: Home From All The Ports [7]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Dad!Barnabas, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injured Barnabas, Kassandra will stab a man for #1 Boat Dad, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 19:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17813720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWaffleBat/pseuds/TheWaffleBat
Summary: She paced, angry and hating that she was angry because the bandit was already dead - killed as soon as she’d come back to herself and realised what the warm-wet down her arm actually was. Not even the time to demand drachmae, she’d just shoved her spear through his skull and knelt down by Barnabas’ side, ripping off a part of her underarmour to help him staunch the wound. Back and forth, back and forth, the cold air doing nothing to help because she was furious - beyond furious! - and now he wasn’t there for Kassandra to beat up and she knew where a camp was for her to kill more of them but she would not leave Barnabas alone, not now.Kassandra doesn't take threats to her father well.





	Such Gentle Temper Found

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from John Keats' _On The Sea_.
> 
> Written for the Prompt by ACKassandra, which I said I probably wouldn't do but then the idea wouldn't leave me alone; _"I love these! Could you maybe do something where Barnabas gets stabbed and Kassandra freaks out because she doesn't know how to handle it and she realises he might die? She realises he's really the only person she trusts and loves like a father?"_

It was a bandit.

A _fucking_ bandit - not the Cult, learning who was important to her and who wasn’t, quick as the blade that dug deep into Barnabas’ belly, too deep, too quick, Kassandra _too fucking slow_ to stop it. Not even a soldier, which would have been galling enough but expected because Argolis was Athenian for the moment and fucking everyone knew her face now, it seemed.

A _bandit_ ; a lucky stab through the dark of the road while Barnabas helped her walk because they had places to be and she was scouting ahead through Ikaros’ eyes and neither of them had the time to stop, stretching the bond out between them with a pain like a dull, grating noise inside her skull that would take hours to die down. He’d come leaping from behind a stubby tree and Barnabas had the poor luck to be on Kassandra’s wrong side; didn’t know how to twist out of the way, didn’t know that he should have ducked out from beneath Kassandra’s arm and let her take it instead because she knew how to take a stab, had armour along her flank that would take the worst of it.

She paced, angry and hating that she was angry because the bandit was already dead - killed as soon as she’d come back to herself and realised what the warm-wet down her arm actually was. Not even the time to demand drachmae, she’d just shoved her spear through his skull and knelt down by Barnabas’ side, ripping off a part of her underarmour to help him staunch the wound. Back and forth, back and forth, the cold air doing nothing to help because she was _furious_ \- beyond furious! - and now he wasn’t there for Kassandra to beat up and she knew where a camp was for her to kill more of them but she _would not leave_ Barnabas alone, not now.

She trusted Hippocrates to try, of course she did, but she liked to think she knew herself well enough to know that if she did leave and if, gods forbid Barnabas _did_ die then she’d send half the world to Hades. And maybe the gods, too, for letting it happen.

 _Everything_ had gone right; she’d _done_ all the right things. Staunched the bleedings, sewn up the wounds because she’d done it to herself often enough to know how, stopping the shake in her hands the way she stopped the panic rising high like an eagle’s scream in her throat, shoving a lid down on pot boiling over. Called over Phobos from where he’d been spooked and hauled Barnabas over the saddle, against his protests that he hated it, and raced as quick as she could to where she knew Hippocrates was camped.

Back and forth, back and forth, and she knew she was frightening the people milling around, the sick and the injured and Hippocrates’ helpers, she just didn’t care, didn’t have the room to care because _Barnabas_ -

No - she turned on her heel from the thought. He would be fine, he would be _fine_ \- he’d survived worse. He’d laughed at her panic, a little bubble of blood trickling over his lip. Said, “Kassandra my friend! You look like Ares himself if Venus stubbed her toe!” He would be _fine_ \- he always laughed, always had jokes for her for when the wearing fight against the Cult dragged her low, too low for a night of proper rest and a day on the Adrestia with the sea and the gulls and Ikaros trying his luck with the bigger fish of the sea, laughing as she pulled him sodden and bedraggled from the water.

 _He would be fine_. She’ll damn the world if he wasn’t.

-:-

Give the man credit, Hipprocrates was a man not at all phased by Kassandra shoving a blade to his throat when he shook her awake. Only murmured, soft and gentle, “Kassandra? Barnabas is asking for you.” And, well, why should Kassandra threaten him after that? He’d dropped everything just to save Barnabas for her, so she dropped her blade into its scabbard in the same way and followed him into Barnabas’ tent, sat on the bedroll when Hippocrates kindly left them alone.

He looked… not dead, which Kassandra supposed was as good a sign as any that Barnabas was going to live. His legs were warm where they pressed into her back; his hands chilled a little when she took them, but fingers curling around hers, solid and _real_ . Rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand like _she_ was the one who needed comforting, fool old man.

But there was still blood in his beard, rusted black as it dried. There was still the bandaging around his flank, the stains in his tunic abandoned in the corner, Barnabas’ borrowed one too strange on his shoulders, too jarring because it wasn’t the gentle soft-blue of Poseidon’s calm sea skies. He’d still been _hurt_ because Kassandra had stopped paying attention, had trusted too much in the strength of her arms and the speed of her eyes, in Ikaros’ sharp gaze to notice everything she couldn’t, and she’d... _Failed_ him - it was her fault he was lying there, warm against her back from a wound that might still kill him, looking at her kindly like she was the one who’d been hurt.

“Dear Kassandra,” Said Barnabas, “What has you so worried?” Hades damn him, he was smiling at her, still so careful as he slid fingers across her knuckles, working open her fist to take it in a more comfortable grip.

“Asks the man who was just stabbed.”

“Bah,” He said, grinning, “This? Just a flesh wound. I’ve had worse.”

She turned away from him, shrugged. “You were _stabbed_ , Barnabas - that’s not… _nothing_. It’s not some scratch my wolf gave you because she wasn’t careful.” Kassandra rubbed the wolf’s dark-furred head, just to take away the sting of it because it wasn’t her fault she didn’t know how to play with Barnabas without hurting him, not knowing how thin human skin really was when she was sat on his lap and launched herself after the stick one of the crewmates threw for her. “I didn’t see him in time,” She said finally, because Barnabas never let her deflect for very long. “He could have-”

“I know,” Said Barnabas with a squeeze, unusually serious and Kassandra swallowed, so many fucking words clicking against the back of her throat, against her teeth - balling into a pearl of all the things she didn’t know how to say.

Kassandra looked to his hand, read it the way she might the hand of somebody she found dead by the roadside, looking for the signs that it might be who she was hired to find. Hundreds of scars, maybe from the knife he used to gut fish and maybe from when he was young, fish hooks digging into the back of his hands, digging in behind the knuckles. Worn rough and calloused, tough as leather; palms burned up from decades handling rope, hauling the sails. An old man, wrinkled and so _fucking_ frail, so fragile that a dead bandit might still kill him.

“I might have not-”

“And I might have become a blacksmith making nails my entire life. Yet here we are - I heard Poseidon first,” Said Barnabas, and his eyes shone with love, warm as the heartbeat pulsing beneath her fingers when she wrapped them around his wrist. “And _you_ killed that bandit, quick as Zeus’ lightning! Brought me to Hippocrates. You saved my _life_ , Kassandra,” He said, and his grin was wide. “Why think on what might have been?”

It was her job to think about it. It was her job to think about anything and everything that could go wrong, to take everything into consideration and work how it could fuck her over if it wasn’t careful. It was her job to keep people away, to keep her heart to herself because look what happened when someone stepped too close to it, took a space in it for themselves? Phoibe murdered by the Cult because she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as senseless a loss any of the others lying cold in the street. It was her job think about it because Barnabas _mattered_ to her; he was not her real father but when had she ever cared about that? He was _hers_ ; hers to keep safe, to laugh with, to cry with, to _love_ as much as she could ever let herself love.

“I’m alive, Kassandra,” Said Barnabas; tugged a little on her hand, not forceful but asking, always asking, so careful never to push that Kassandra went with it, letting herself be pulled down until she fit just beneath Barnabas’ arm.

She didn’t fit, not really. She was too tall, too broad in the shoulders. Barnabas had once laughed that for Nikolaos she must have been more of a son than some true sons would be; she was not the kind of dainty little thing that needed to be kept safe from the biting night wind. But, well, it was _nice_ ; his arm was warm beneath her cheek, his chest when she rolled over and put her ear to it, hearing the wonderful heart as it beat. When he touched her hair, playing with the braid, smoothing out the strands that had come loose and stuck up around her face.

“I’m alive,” He said again. “And if it turns out that the gods are playing with us, well; I could never regret having known you, my friend. To know that you care for me enough to kill a man as soon as he’s hurt me.”

“I suppose you should know that I’d kill Hades if he tried to take you for something so stupid as a _bandit_ ,” She told him, tucking her head beneath his chin not quite like how Ikaros sometimes put his back beneath hers but still nice to feel it pressed into the top of her head, a comforting weight against remembered panic that made her feel so horribly floaty. “It will be Poseidon to kill you, or no one.”

Barnabas laughed, squeezed her close. “Ah, what man would not be jealous when he finds that my daughter’s love goes so far as godslaying!”

**Author's Note:**

> _Not a part of[Home From All The Ports](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1256690), but can fall anywhere in that continuity._
> 
> EDIT: Cancel that, I've decided to keep all my Dad!Barnabas fics in one place so it's been included in the series.


End file.
